Sadly these days, although some still retain a working irori, in one room of most old houses in the village there will be a dip in the tatami, rather like the shallow depression left by a pauper's grave. This is the site of an irori that has been abandoned and covered over with tatami. The main reason for this is that there are now much safer ways of heating and cooking in buildings that are very prone to the risk of fire.
The disappearance of hearths in Japan, however, as in other parts of the world, apart from any environmental considerations or safety precautions, is also, I believe, a symbolic indication of the direction that our sophisticated, so-called civilized cultures are taking us. It has always struck me that the word "hearth" looks as though it is composed of the two words "heart" and "earth," and the world over, the fire used to be the heart of the home and was originally built simply on the earth (Scotland and Ireland often burned earth in the form of peat). These days we are forgetting both heart and earth in our haste toward haste.
♦ The Storehouse (Kura)
Apart from barns and outhouses, it is common for a house to have a special storehouse (kura) close by, or sometimes adjoining it. These buildings have a distinctive design and structure of their own and somewhere on their exterior (a shutter or gable end) bear the family crest. The kura is used for storing furniture and domestic items that are not in use during a particular season. Traditionally, furnishings, such as sitting cushions (zabuton), futons and covers, karakami, pottery, lacquer ware, hanging scrolls, pictures, etc., along with seasonal clothing, will be changed according to the time of year. The furnishings, decorations, and even eating utensils will reflect colors, images, and themes of the seasonal landscape and farming activities outside the house. As in the winter, materials will tend to be heavier and more solid, to create a feeling of warmth within the house, and at the same time often carry images of winter; so in the summer, things will tend to be made of materials light in terms of both weight and color in order to create a general feeling of coolness and airiness during the hot, humid months. At the same time, different utensils and furnishings might be used for special occasions—weddings, funerals, etc.— and need to be stored when not in use. Foodstuffs, such as rice and miso, are also stored in the kura, which is built with thick walls of clay or stone that maintain a stable temperature and humidity throughout the year's seasonal extremes. Of prime importance, of course, is the fact that they are fireproof.
In addition to the kura, in a village like Sora where each household is engaged in either farming or fishing, or often both, there is also at least one barn or outhouse attached or in close proximity to the house. In the case of our own house, there was a barn adjoining the back of the house, with access to it internally from the kitchen, as well as from the outside.
Up until the fifties, each household kept a bullock which was used for a variety of tasks throughout the agricultural calendar. Since then, farmers began to buy gasoline-engined cultivators and, later, small versatile tractors. These tractors consist of an engine on two wheels, with long handlebars for steering and on which the controls are mounted. This two-wheeled tractor is made stable by a variety of combinations—tractor and trailer, tractor and cultivator, and so on.
The bullock and the cadence of its movement—the rhythm of which impressed itself not only physically in the shaping of fields and tracks but also on the temporal frame of work and life—its body temperature, its smell, and voice like the working horse of Britain, has vanished from Noto and the rest of Japan. But now and then, a hint or shadow can be detected in a neglected byre-end of a barn, the grease on the side of a doorway or wall, the warm patina on an old hitching-place, or glimpsed in the minds of the aged in the warmth of his or her voice when reminiscing around the fire or beside the stove on a winter's night.
♦ The Bath (Furo)
Most of our neighbors still heated their baths by burning wood. Some of these tubs were made of cast iron with the fire built directly beneath them. This entailed the installation of a wooden pallet on the bottom of the tub to prevent the bather's lower body from getting burned. But the more traditional types of tub were constructed of cypress wood, with a section built into the bath, incorporating a cast-iron firebox into which the wood was placed for heating the water.
Between 4:30 and 5:00 in the afternoon, depending on the season, when villagers returned from the fields, and before they had their evening meal, the first clouds of blue smoke from their baths would drift between the houses, or lift like a spirit-form of the tree that the wood had once been, into the sky, perfuming the village.
Passing by a house, you would hear the distinctive sounds of water being lifted from the tub and poured over the bather's body with a wooden scoop or plastic bowl, and the "clop" sound as it was replaced on the floor after the ablutions were completed. The bather then stepped into the tub to soak. These sounds would echo and be magnified by the bare walls of the bathroom, as would the voice, often sweetened with saké, of one of our neighbors, the headman on a late summer's night in the bath after a night's drinking.
Regrettably, our own bath had been converted so that the water was heated by a kerosene-fired heater in a system separate from the bathroom and located in the barn, while the kerosene tank was secured to the outside wall just below the window of the bathroom.
In the old days in the village, only certain houses possessed a bathroom, so that those families that had none were invited to bathe in a neighbor's house. In some houses, as many as forty people might have bathed in one tub of an evening.
Generally, the bathroom floor is tiled or is made of concrete with a wooden deck. Sometimes the tub is sealed into the floor which has a drain, and often in older bathrooms there is a pit beneath the tub where a drain is situated. It was in just such a pit beneath the tub in an old house we lived in, in Tokyo, that I discovered a dead rat. The smell had been getting progressively worse each time we entered the house over the period of a week, until the molecules it was borne on began to describe precisely the shape of its origin and its location. One evening I looked beneath the tub with the aid of a torch, and there it was, at the far end. I cut two long, thin pieces of bamboo from our tiny garden and, using them like chopsticks, tried to extricate the corpse, which had by now, in the warmth of spring weather, decomposed and was merely assuming its former shape and offered nothing substantial to take hold of. It simply became rat puree at the ends of the bamboo! I finally had to flush it out by emptying the water from the tub, which filled the entire pit before it reached the drain, where its escape became impeded by fur and small pieces of bone that I had to remove by hand.
The stench had become so powerful during this operation—its last molecular onslaught being augmented by the water—that it became indelibly imprinted on my olfactory processes and associated with the bathroom scent of soap. For weeks afterward, each time I came to bathe it was as though I soaped my body with the corpse of the rat!
♦ The Toilet (Benjo)
The toilet in our house was a traditional Japanese benjo; that is, basically just a hole in the floor that accessed to a large dark cavern beneath the house over which one crouched, not unlike lavatories in many other parts of the world. And since we owned no rice field on which to use the contents as fertilizer, it had to be emptied by a local firm at regular intervals, usually according to the number of people visiting the house. Once it was emptied, the heavy dark smell that emerged from it and permeated the house, and probably our clothes as well, gave way to a strange scent like a bouquet of ozone, and the first turds of the new cycle echoed like hymn books being dropped in a cathedral.
This ecclesiastical image is not entirely out of place, as I remember once, when I was staying in a Zen temple, that it was my duty to clean the benjo. This task entailed scraping the day's feces from a wooden chute just below the hole into the pit. This operation was performed with the help of a large wooden spatula with a prayer written on its handle and was considered an important spiritual practice.
On the occasion of having our benjo emptied for the first time after moving in, added to the expected contents it was discovered to contain six pairs of slippers! This find, from then on, seemed to endow the space below the house with the powers of some lower-world purgatory.
After some months, we learned that the Korean